(Risa POV)
I parried Milim's Stardust-enhanced fist with a Pseudo-Stardust enhanced arm of my own, swinging my blade so fast that the heat from the Legend-Class blade tore the very space between us, as it warped under the pressure of my own Pseudo-Stardust.
Naturally, my arm tore off at the elbow from the force of Milim's punch, but my sacrifice gambit paid off. My blade screamed through the air, streaking so quick that not even Milim's reflexes could help her dodge it.
Right?
Nope. At the last second, she ducked backward, ever so slightly. The blade barely missed her skin, as she turned her head toward me.
"Oh." I had just enough time to make that noise as my sword flashed over to cross my regenerated arm, trying to protect my body from the energy that Milim had already gathered.
My sword arm wasn't fast enough. Not that it mattered. Even with my Pseudo-Stardust covering my entire body, and my physical efficiency so much higher than hers due to my combat analysis skills, my Pseudo-Stardust was basically just magicules abnormally condensed through Horus. The fact that I couldn't replicate the part of her Ra skill that allowed Milim to create the real deal was an unassailable gap between us.
"DRAGO-BULLET!" The bullet that Milim had been secretly gathering in her off hand for the last two seconds punched right through my arm, then my torso, and kept going. In less than a second, my body had completely withered away from instant Stardust poisoning.
I was dead.
…
"DANG IT! I CAN'T BEAT THAT POWER GAP!" I complained, rolling around on the fake grass in irritation (in my humanoid form) as my body reappeared a few minutes later.
"Hey, you can make me use half of my power, you know. Don't sell yourself short, that's kinda crazy." Milim reminded me as she stared at a nearby wall, where her real body's vision was projected.
We were currently in a mindscape. Thanks to Aether bolstering our Thought Communication connection, I could pull part of Milim's consciousness directly into one of the mindscapes that I could create for training and testing purposes via Thoth.
In this little area, Milim and I could do just about anything that we could think of.
Unfortunately, Milim still needed to work, which meant that, even though I'd accelerated our time in the mindscape, she still needed to periodically look in on and guide her real body to read and sign various things.
"Oh, please. You were using closer to a third than half." I called Milim out, rolling my eyes, "See?"
I posted the EP ratings for us throughout the fight on the wall beside Milim. Mine were stable. Eight million, just under half of Rimuru's. My full power. Almost insanely high for a normal True Demon Lord, but nothing compared to a True Dragon, or a freak like Rimuru.
Exhibit A: Milim's reading during our fight.
20 million at the beginning. Around thrice mine. I'd been able to handle that with my newly-mastered Pseudo-Stardust and my superior technique, thanks to Thoth.
But as she realized that she couldn't break through my defenses with that level of power, she'd ramped it up.
And ramped it up more. By the end of our fight, she was outputting almost exactly ten times my own power. That'd been my limit. No matter how much I concentrated my aura and used my godlike combat skills to keep up, I couldn't cross that gap. And it was still only around a third of what her constitution could actually utilize.
Especially since Milim's combat senses weren't anywhere near dull. In fact, they were top class. The best I'd ever fought, aside from my one recent simulation against Isis, who beat my butt with an EP of 250,000 (Which seems tiny, but is still comparable to a Demon Lord Seed) and a normal wooden stick.
Against someone that skilled, you don't really learn anything. You just lose, then about twenty minutes later find yourself wondering how.
"Do you really have to nitpick all the tiny little details?" Milim complained, laying down on the grass beside me.
I pointed upward, "Tiny little details can be really cool, Milim. Don't you agree?" I asked.
This place wasn't real. It was basically just a massive box, with set dimensions that I couldn't really change much, even if I tried. They were massive dimensions, but there were solid walls in all six directions. No planetary curve, no celestial bodies up above.
But since this was all just a private mental dimension that's entire purpose was in hanging out with Milim in, I'd gone to great lengths to put in small details.
For example, up above was a perfect simulation of the night sky in the real world. There was a five-kilometer deep layer of dirt beneath our feet, and the gently-blowing breeze smelled faintly of fresh-cut grass, despite all of this only existing in our minds.
There were even impressions in the grass, where I'd crushed it just rolling around.
"It's really pretty." Milim admitted, "Wow… This brings back memories." Her voice was full of complicated nostalgia.
My mind flashed with what I knew about Milim's past. She'd told me a little bit, but she'd always been really evasive about it. From what I knew, she'd wandered the earth alone for centuries, after awakening Sataniel, Lord of Wrath during the incident that created the Barren Lands and destroyed the highly advanced Elven civilization that'd once existed in Dhistav.
From then on, her only steadfast allies were Ramiris (who was stuck in some eternal reincarnation cycle due to what she'd done to help Guy stop Milim from destroying the world, and tended to move often, vanishing for years, even decades at a time.), and Guy, who tended to act rather cold to her, like a distant uncle or something.
Things got a bit better a few centuries after everything, when Middray was born and created the Dragon Faithful, but it still didn't change the isolated nature of Milim's existence.
For thousands of years. She'd probably looked up at this sky for hours on end at a time, back when it looked noticeably different.
"Do you want me to change it? The stars?" I asked.
Milim was silent for a second, before she responded. "Can you do that?" She asked.
I replied by changing the stars to match the patterns on Earth, from Big Bro Rimuru's memory.
"Whoa… This is Earth's sky, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"...There are more stars." She noted.
"This world's a lot more isolated than Earth was. This is probably about average, maybe a bit below." I explained.
Milim was silent for a long time. "...Can you layer them on top of each other? I… don't want to forget."
The original stars returned. Suddenly, the sky was much fuller, brighter than before. Suddenly, it felt like a pattern had emerged, even though it'd actually simply made the pattern that'd already been there more complex.